Virtual Court In The Era Of Covid-19

“When written in Chinese the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two components.
One represents danger, and the other represents ‘opportunity’ “ – John F. Kennedy

The Covid-19 pandemic has disarray the justice delivery system like never before. The virtual court is the most defining concept that the pandemic has introduced to the legal environment around the world, and this gesture has also had an effect on the reform in the structure of the Indian Court. The technological skill of the judicial system, the principles of which remained unchanged throughout the last century, with little to no development dramatically altered because of the perplexing situation required by the pandemic. The compulsions associated with “social distancing” coupled with lockdown directives have led courts and tribunals to shut their premises to the
public. At the same time, recognizing that a complete shutdown of the justice delivery system is undesirable, the judiciary has turned to technology to meet the challenges posed by the pandemic. The present situation clearly depicts the effect on society and economy if the justice system comes to a halt. It causes great hardships to the legal system, practitioners, and mainly to the litigants. One cannot rule out altogether, the occurrence of a similar situation
in the future that causes a interference such as the current Covid-19 pandemic, therefore, it is essential that we prepare ourselves with a better virtual court setup. Further, the access to hearings would be limited to people registered, as that is the only way to filter that fraud and ensure misrepresentation does not take place. Going forward with increased technology, awareness, provision of facilities in all districts, it could be used extensively, and physical Courts could be reserved as an exception for conduct of hearings of public interest or other excepted categories. This is the need of the hour and judicial administrators are responding proactively to the challenges posed by the pandemic.

Virtual courts expedite processes and procedures and are an improvement over traditional courts as they are more affordable, citizen friendly and offer greater access to justice. The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the justice delivery system like never before. The compulsions associated with ‘social distancing’ coupled with lockdown directives have led courts and tribunals to shut their premises to the public. At the same time, recognizing that a complete shut-down of the justice delivery system is undesirable, judicial administrators have turned to technology to meet the challenges posed by the pandemic. Various judicial and quasi-judicial bodies, led by the Supreme Court, have been conducting hearings online. The spread of Coronavirus and the nationwide lockdown has prompted the Supreme Court and various High Courts to conduct judicial proceedings online. The Supreme Court has detailed the measures to ensure continuity of administration of justice during the COVID-19 pandemic. IT infrastructure is being installed to aid the proceedings that will take place in the virtual presence of the clients and their legal representatives. While the need of the hour requires such steps to be taken, it is imperative that free and fair administration of justice is not disrupted. Some of a virtual court’s biggest benefits are cost savings and availability of hours of service. However, this is restrictive in that many litigants needing access to the courts also work on business days. Not only can virtual courts remove this barrier by allowing online access to electronic filing and other case processing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but litigants will also be able to participate in video conferencing trials. Litigants will no longer be forced to leave work for court, as they will have access to proceedings from their home or office. The institutions’ digitization and computerization will also introduce transparency and better management into the functioning of the judiciary. As we can clearly see, the video conference facility introduced to mitigate the spread of COVID19 in court has helped to divert traffic in the courthouse and, with the help of remote video technology, has moved to virtual courts.